Big week at HQ. And by "HQ" I mean my apartment, which is now home to a business, a pile of cables, and exactly one more human working with me than before.
That's right. I hired my first person.
Here's the funny part: it's not a developer. If you'd asked me a year ago who my first hire would be, I would've said some brilliant engineer who types at the speed of light. Nope. It's a bookkeeper. She's on a retainer — not on payroll — and she handles the books, the accounting, and all the filing to the government. If you've followed my eBIRFORMS nightmares or the ongoing BIR adventure, you know I have strong opinions about paperwork. Now she gets to have them instead of me.
And honestly? It's the best money I've spent. Every month I used to lose days to receipts, computations, and forms that seemed designed by someone who hates productivity. Now that's just... her problem. My problem is programming, which is exactly the problem I signed up for.
More time to code. That's the whole dream, isn't it? Hire people to do the things that drain you, so you can do the things that light you up. I'm not saying I'll never touch a spreadsheet again. I'm saying I choose to.
Now for the second announcement. UniSMS API has a new kid on the block: virtual numbers. And we're rolling them out in closed beta.
What's a virtual number? Short version: it's a number that can do two-way SMS. Before, our SMS API was mostly a one-way street — send a message, job done. Now those messages can come back. Your users can reply, and you can actually talk to them on that number. Think OTP replies, support threads, order confirmations that get a human "yes, please!" — that whole conversation.
We're keeping the beta small on purpose. Just a few users for now, the kind who'll poke and prod and tell us exactly what's broken. Because there's nothing like a tiny, loud group to make a product better than a huge, silent one. We'll break things quietly, fix them fast, and open the floodgates when it's actually ready.
If you want to read more about why we built our own SMS API for the Philippines in the first place — spoiler: existing providers made us want to scream — check that post out.
So there it is. One hire, one beta, one very happy founder who just saved a mountain of time. If this keeps up, maybe next week I'll hire someone to write these blog posts too. (Just kidding. This part is still fun.)